Once upon a time, Neil Gaiman‘s novel American Gods was bound for HBO, with rumored notions developing for a six-series adaptation that would feature new material in addition to the original storyline of the novel. The story, about a man who is drawn into a conflict between gods old and new, is certainly big enough for several seasons.

American Gods slowed down at HBO last year, however, and in November Gaiman told Reddit that the show was no longer at HBO. “There is an American Gods TV series in the works. It’s no longer with HBO. The moment that things are ready to be announced I am sure they will be, either legitimately or via a leak in a big Hollywood Agency mailroom.”

Now FremantleMedia North America has picked up the rights to the book, and has Gaiman onboard to exec produce a series. Read More »

There’s a new issue of Neil Gaiman‘s The Sandman on stands now. It launches a short ongoing story called TheSandman: Overture, acting as an explanation of events that preceded the first issue of the seminal comic series. It’s the first new Sandman story since 2003, and the first series of multiple issues since the series originally ended in 1996. (And, in keeping with some periods of the original publication, Overture is already experiencing delays.)

All of which is a long way of saying that a lot of people are thinking and talking about Sandman again, and that seems to have re-ignited the interest in making a movie at Warner Bros. The latest word is that David Goyer has pitched a take that WB likes, and that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the ideal candidate to play the lynchpin character Morpheus. Read More »

The long-running BBC series Doctor Who just named the twelfth person to play the title character: Peter Capaldi. The actor is a great many things: rakishly charming, savagely funny, frighteningly intense, and Scottish. He’s also white and male, which isn’t quite what some fans of the show hoped for.

Since the eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, announced his departure, there were hopes among parts of the Who fandom that the show would turn towards an actor of color, or (gasp!) a woman to lead the show. After all, the actor changes are explained in-show through the Doctor’s ability to regenerate into a new body, and there’s no reason he has to be a white guy. The audience for the show has expanded exponentially in the last few years, and a non-white or female choice could both enrich the series and draw in even more viewers.

Maybe this won’t be great for Capaldi — no one wants to hear they weren’t first choice — but Neil Gaiman, who has written for the show, says a black actor was approached to be the Doctor, but turned down the role. Read More »

Joe Wright certainly has a thing for literary adaptations, as evidenced by his films Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and Anna Karenina. Now he’s looking to direct yet another book-inspired movie, but this one moves him back to the present day and into a whole other genre. Wright has just been attached to direct Focus Features’ The Ocean at the End of the Lane, based on an upcoming novel by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman‘s best-selling YA novel The Graveyard Book, a ghoulish play on The Jungle Book, has been in development heck for a little while. It was announced as a stop-motion Disney project directed by Henry Selick (Coraline) in early 2012, but that version was put on hold when Selick and Disney parted ways late last year.

Now the project is back in action, and remains at Disney. But a couple big things have changed. One is that Ron Howard is in talks to step in to direct. The other is that his version will be a live-action film. Read More »

Once upon a time, Warner Bros. was thinking of making a movie based on Neil Gaiman‘s comic book series Sandman. This confused many people, as Sandman is a wide-ranging collection of stories and characters that does not at all lend itself to a Big Studio Movie. You think Watchmen came out a little wonky? Translating Sandman to the screen makes adapting Watchmen seem like a breeze.

Anyway, the movie didn’t happen, perhaps because the most confused people were at Warner Bros. Neil Gaiman did spend time at one point trying to explain the series to the suits, and commissioned a big suite of images to help get the idea across. Those images are now online. They’re more a slideshow encapsulation of the grand scope of Sandman than true concept art, and those who know the series well will recognize moments from many of the major story arcs from the series’ 75-issue run. Read More »

Briefly: Yesterday we told you two things: one, that Disney had picked upNeil Gaiman‘s The Graveyard Book and would make development of a feature based on the book a priority. And two, that Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas and another Neil Gaiman book adaptation, Coraline, has been consulting with Disney and Pixar talent for his latest feature. Turns out those things are more closely related than we thought.

Now Disney has attached Selick to direct The Graveyard Book, which sounds wonderful. I thought very highly of his work on Coraline, which aside from the one character invented for the film, was a really solid effort. Incidentally, Deadline also says that The Graveyard Book will come after the film Selick has been working on for the past year.

Here’s where there’s some confusion. Deadline says that Selick is “already working for Disney-based Pixar on a top secret film.” That contrasts the last info we had, which said that Selick had consulted with Pixar on the feature he’s working on at his own animation studio, Cinderbiter. Regardless, Disney is set to release his next film, and I wouldn’t settle into the idea that he’s making a Pixar movie just yet.

You’d think that Disney had the screen rights all sewn up for adaptations of Rudyard Kipling‘s story collection The Jungle Book. But in fact the book is public domain. (It was when Walt Disney set the animated film into motion, too.) And there have been a few live-action films over the years, some by Disney, some not. Now we may soon see a new version of the story of the boy Mowgli, raised in the Indian jungle by Baloo the bear and Bagheera, a black panther.

Meanwhile, in an interesting turn of events, today also sees a deal through which Disney will produce and distribute a film based on Neil Gaiman‘s novel The Graveyard Book. That novel was written with the express inspiration of The Jungle Book, though in Gaiman’s text the jungle is replaced with — you got it — a cemetery.

There’s a certain risk in falling in love with an HBO show. Talk to fans of Deadwood, Carnivale and/or Rome and you’ll hear bitter tales like those spat out by jilted lovers. That won’t be the case with Game of Thrones, say HBO execs, who during a press tour today addressed plans for the show’s future. Along with that talk, there was brief mention of the upcoming adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods, which is still in the very early stages. Read More »